From: Ged Byrne <gedb01@...>
Date: 2003-08-18T23:17:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Question: immutable strings as design goal?

Am I correct in thinking that as long as you avoid the
methods ending with an exclamation mark, then your
strings will be effectively immutable?


 --- Robert Feldt <feldt@ce.chalmers.se> wrote: > 
> > |www.artima.com in which he criticized Ruby's
> mutable strings - saying
> > |that of such a horror he could ne'er conceive, or
> something :)
> >
> > If mutable strings are horror, mutable
> dictionaries should be as well.
> > The one with such standard should go to
> side-effect free language like
> > Haskell. ;-)
> >
> I agree that it sounds like a very ad hoc design
> decision.
> 
> > I rarely have such problems caused by mutable
> strings.  Besides, Ruby
> > is not a language to keep people away from horror.
>  You can write
> > ugly, scary, or dangerous programs in Ruby, if you
> want.  It's cost
> > for freedom.
> >
> This points to an important "philosophical"
> difference that stands
> out to me when comparing Ruby and Python: Python
> gives me the feeling of 
> trying to be a "Language for the Masses" (LFM) and
> tries to put 
> restrictions on what can be done. You need to format
> your code in a certain 
> way, your strings (but only a minority of other
> objects) are immutable by 
> default etc. As discussed on ll1-discuss mailing
> list and
> other places LFM's are in contrast to LFSP's
> (Language for Smart People /
> experts) that tries to give you as much power as
> possible.
> 
> To me the LFM thinking is absurd and even inhumane
> since it (ironically
> enough) says that there is an elite that know the
> area well enough to
> decide what other people is allowed to use.
> 
> To me matz goal seems to be for less of an LFM than
> Guidos.
> 
> Then again I have too little experience with Python
> vs. Ruby to actually
> know. I also may be exaggerating since also matz has
> his limits (no
> macros in Ruby, no multi-methods etc) ;).
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Robert Feldt
> 
> 
> Ps. "Rough" Immutable strings in ruby:
> 
> s1 = "a"
> s1[0] = ?b
> p s1              # => b
> def ims(string)
>   string.freeze
> end
> s2 = ims "a"
> p s1              # => a
> s2[0] = ?b        # => `[]=': can't modify frozen
> string (TypeError)
> 
> ;)
> 
>  

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